NASA is indicating that the asteroid 99942 Apophis, which had previously been deemed to not be an impact risk, might pose a bigger risk than originally thought:

It turns out that there are a few things we still don’t know about the orbit of Apophis, which could change its projected course by millions of miles, according to an article yesterday in New Scientist. Are we going to get slammed by the 270-meter long hunk of rock? We probably won’t know for sure until we get a closer look at its close-ish Earth flyby in 2013.

There’s no need to panic just yet, but this frustrating lack of information does provide more evidence that we really do need to steer some more funding and work into the asteroid detection/deflection area.

Image credit: Wong Family Pictures photostream

Barbara Stocking explains that simply dropping food into Burma is much harder than it sounds.

[A]ir drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems.

For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place. We don’t know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Without good intelligence it’s very hard to run an effective humanitarian operation – especially an airborne one. It would be only too easy to drop the food miles from the nearest village, or even in water or swamp. Food is perishable and leaving it outside for too long could ruin it. You can’t drop a well or a sanitation system from the sky without specialists to set it up. Communities could find themselves with aid completely inappropriate to their situation.

Of course, air drops would presumably be at least marginally better than standing by and doing nothing while waiting for the junta to allow us to help. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. That’s pretty much always the case when “Send in the military!” is proposed as a solution to some crisis.

True, we managed to overcome plenty of obstacles in a somewhat similar situation decades ago with the Berlin Airlift. But we were dealing with a rather smaller geographic area and had plenty of experienced people on the ground to deal with the sort of issues Stocking describes.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Dave Schuler rounds up several press accounts of the massive earthquake damage in China, which has killed untold tens of thousands of people. Most notable is the number of schools that collapsed, dooming the children inside. He concludes,

It’s not for a lack of money: China is holding nearly a half trillion dollars worth of U. S. Treasury bonds. Why don’t they spend it? I think it’s because of a widespread belief in Chinese officialdom that the people don’t really matter.

Harsh but, I strongly suspect, exactly right.

Romesh Ratnesar takes to the pages of TIME to ask, in apparent seriousness, “Is It Time to Invade Burma?”

The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

[...]

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

Let me just go on the record: Hell no, it’s not time to invade Burma. Are you friggin’ kidding me?

Frankly, I don’t care what the junta in Burma wants. The international community doesn’t recognize them as legitimate. If the people who do these things for a living decide that ignoring the junta and dropping relief supplies will do more good than harm, I don’t have any problems with it.

But coercive humanitarian intervention? No, thanks.

Steven Royster, Spokesman for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, had this to say of the tragic cyclone which has killed tens of thousands of people in Burma:

When a crisis like this strikes around the world, the Department of State’s first thought is for the safety of American citizens. As the storm brewed offshore, colleagues at the American Embassy in Rangoon issued two messages to Americans in country with advice on how to prepare for Nargis.

The Attackerman is outraged and snarks, “Don’t be surprised if that gets quoted in the next bin Laden tape.”

But, um, isn’t the first thought of the United States government supposed to be for the welfare of its own citizens? Those people our government is of, for, and by? Those people whose ancestors ordained its Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”? Who, you know, pay for the government to begin with?

Indeed, I’m given to understand that “The mission of the U.S. Department of State is to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.” Notice the order?

It’s not as if we’re not offering millions in aid to the Burmese victims, with many more millions doubtless to come. (If the murdering thugs who run the place accept it, of course.) We’re pretty generous at times like this. That doesn’t mean we don’t look out for our own, first.

Well actually it was 12, but don’t tell Barack Obama that!

“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser.

Yeah, guess I missed it.

As the Illinois senator concluded his remarks a few minutes later, he appeared to realize his gaffe.

“There are going to be times when I get tired,” he said. “There are going to be times when I get weary. There are going to be times when I make mistakes.”

Okay, but please, don’t make a mistake with that red button that launches the nukes. That isn’t the emergency call button the White House Pastry Department.

A couple of months ago, I noted that there was a mysterious epidemic centered around the world’s beehives. Now it appears that another ailment may be threatening our freshwater fish.

A virus in the U.S. Great Lakes that has killed tens of thousands of fish in recent years is spreading and poses a threat to inland fish farming, a U.S. Agriculture Department official said on Monday.

The pathogen, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, causes internal bleeding in fish. It does not harm humans, even if they eat infected fish.

The federal agency issued an emergency order in October to limit movement of live fish caught in the eight states bordering the Great Lakes and two Canadian provinces.

“We’re concerned that this virus could get out of the Great Lakes and affect other populations,” Jill Roland, a fish pathologist and assistant director for aquaculture for the USDA in Riverdale, Maryland, said in a telephone interview.

“The virus could potentially affect the catfish industry,” she said.

Catfish make up the largest sector of the $1 billion U.S. aquaculture industry, accounting for $462 million in sales, according to a 2005 USDA aquaculture census.

Nasty stuff. Here’s hoping that the quarantine can be maintained–it sounds like this isn’t something we want spreading down the Mississippi…

At least fourteen people were killed in a wave of tornadoes that struck Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri.

A powerful storm system packing tornadoes that killed at least seven people in Alabama and one other in Missouri is being blamed for nine more deaths in Georgia, a state official said early Friday. The storm, which swept through Georgia Thursday night, killed six people in Baker County near the town of Newton, Fire Chief Andy Belinc said early Friday.

[...]

A tornado apparently touched down near the Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, 117 miles south of Atlanta, killing at least two people at or near the hospital, injuring an undetermined number of others and damaging the building, Weiss said.

[...]

The burst of tornadoes was part of a larger line of thunderstorms and snowstorms that stretched from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. Authorities blamed a tornado for the death of a 7-year-old girl in Missouri, and twisters were reported in Kansas.

Officials in Alabama were blaming the storms for at least seven deaths in that state, including five at a school in Enterprise, about 75 miles south of Montgomery, where a roof and wall collapsed, pinning people, after being struck by a tornado.

The Birmingham News reports the death toll in Alabama may be over 18.

I’ve been to many of those places, having lived just a few miles from Enterprise while teaching at Troy State and not too far from Newton and Americus when I was teaching at Bainbridge College. I also lived at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for a year, although that was more than thirty years ago, now. A week ago, tornadoes devastated the town of Dumas, Arkansas, where my mother-in-law grew up.

It’s amazing how powerful these storms are and how suddenly-appearing. In Alabama, tornadoes are so common and have done so much damage that the big television stations in Birmingham have been known to preempt programming for non-stop Storm Watch Super Doppler Radar 6 programming during any Tornado Warning, breathlessly following the path of the storm activity. Some of us have been known to complain about this level of hype. Still, there have been several incidents now where schools, churches, and other large gatherings were struck with catastrophic effect.

Steven Taylor, who lives outside Montgomery and still teaches in Troy, has several posts on the storms (here, here, here, and here).

On a day when DC area schools are shut down for miles in each direction because of something on the order of one inch of snow, Stacy McCain reflects on the phenomenon of “Beltway blizzard bumper cars.”

Ignoring common cautions most Americans learned as 15-year-olds — e.g., always check your blind spot before changing lanes to your right — D.C. drivers crash with astonishing frequency, a persistent problem that peaks during periods of precipitation. A brief shower is sure to result in dozens of traffic tie-ups caused by morons fishtailing into guardrails, and snow sends the region spiraling into vehicular paralysis.

The Beltway media establishment panders shamelessly to Washington’s fear of snow. Days before the arrival of potential snowstorms, TV stations in the nation’s capital begin broadcasting dire declarations of impending doom. “Storm Watch” logos appear on the screen, as TV weathermen trade snow banter with blow-dried anchorpersons, engaging in what can only be described as “accumulation speculation.” Will the snow melt or stick? How many inches? Will it be bad enough to close schools? Is the apocalypse at hand?

This isn’t entirely a Beltway phenomenon, of course; most of the Deep South goes into similar panic over the threat of modest snow. Then again, at least people down there know how to drive in the rain. And I darn sure never heard of “sun delays” until moving to these parts.

A mysterious ailment is having a catastrophic effect on the nation’s bee population.

A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday.

Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries.

[...]

Researchers from state and federal agriculture agencies have been frustrated in their search for a cause because affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees.

The number of bees in a hive typically diminishes over a period of days to the point where there are very few or none left, Hackenberg said. There is no indication of where the bees have gone or what drove them away, he said.

“The rate of loss is startling,” said Jeff Pettis, a bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland.

This is a rather disturbing development. Large sectors of the nation’s agricultural output is dependent on pollination by honeybees, and a significant decline in population can affect harvests to the tune of billions of dollars. Hopefully the cause of this population destruction can be isolated and a cure developed in short order. It’s tough to say how parts of the industry might cope if the bee population continues to dwindle.

Over the past year there were predictions about how bad hurricanes were going to get (example). That we should expect more and stronger hurricanes. One problem though, so far this hurricane season is one of the least active in decades.

So what happened? Lots.

Storms were starved for fuel after ingesting masses of dry Saharan dust and air over the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists say the storm-snuffing dust was more abundant than usual this year.

In the season’s peak, storms were curving right like errant field goals. High pressure that normally hunkers near Bermuda shifted far eastward, and five storms rode the clockwise winds away from Florida.

Finally, a rapidly growing El Nino, a warming of water over the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifted winds high in the atmosphere southward. The winds left developing storms disheveled and unable to become organized.

As they say about the stock market: Past results are no indication of future performance.

This year’s uneventful season provides no assurance that next year will be as calm:

• The Atlantic remains in a 20- to 30-year cycle of high hurricane activity that started in 1995. Water temperatures are above normal.
• El Nino probably won’t be around to decapitate storms.

There’s no promise that the Saharan dust will be as abundant.

So, it looks like it was some fortuitous events that resulted in the quiet hurricane season this year. However, the article does note that we are in a 20 to 30 year cycle of high hurricane activity. Still, a bit of good news given last years disasters.

In case you missed the 7/24 news reports last week, the Pacific Northwest got slammed by the “Pineapple Express,” a series of relatively warm major storms that blasted Oregon, Washington, and BC*. These storms gave torrential downpours of rain, rather than the seasonally expected snow, causing massive flooding. But imagine you were just a tourist, trapped behind floodwaters. Are you liable for charges until the car is returned?

Claude Hite was seeking adventure when he left his Tampa, Fla., home for a camping trip with a friend in the Hoh Rain Forest. But becoming caught in heavy rains and having to leave his rental car behind was more than he anticipated.
Hite and Kenny Stadelman became trapped Nov. 6 when rains washed out part of the only road in the rain forest in Olympic National Park. The National Weather Service said 6 to 12 inches of rain fell throughout the park on Nov. 6. A typical rainy, winter day would bring a half to one inch of rain.
“It was tricky not to fall into the chasm when we thought we were past the point of no return,” Hite told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “And then we got to where there wasn’t any road to be flooded, and we stopped in the nick of time. … I could have died; it was that close.”
It was two days before the men were rescued by park service employees, along with two stranded park workers. However, Hite’s rented Chrysler PT Cruiser had to be left behind. It remains stuck as federal highway officials survey damage at the park. Officials said they don’t know when the road will be repaired.
Hite, an epidemiologist for the state of Florida, rented the car for 17 days for $425, plus fuel, from Thrifty Car Rental at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
It’s due back Sunday, when he flies home.

To repeat, 6 inches to a foot of rain that DAY.

“So according to our rental contract, we are responsible for paying the rent until the car is recovered,” he said.
It’s an additional $20 to $27 for each day a car is out. Charges generally accrue until a rental car is returned, although Thrifty risk manager Greg MacKenzie said he might lower the rate in Hite’s case.
MacKenzie said the company will retrieve the car after the park service builds a new road to access the Hoh Rain Forest visitor center, where the storm knocked out power. He said Bill Rohde, a district ranger at Olympic, told him it could be two or three weeks.
“It’s raining like crazy. Winds are howling,” said Rohde, who 11 years ago had a car stranded in the park for six months after a fall storm.

Hmmm, until a new road is built. Ouch.

Meanwhile, the next National Park to the west is basically destroyed for tourist visitations for a few years. Mt Rainier will endure, unless the mountain decides otherwise (possibly the case on a dormant volcano) but all the access roads have been destroyed. As I write this the National Park Service website can’t handle the load, but the damage can be seen there when it recovers

For those not familiar with the area, this means that the 2 major areas of the park are now about 200 miles apart, rather than 30 miles – assuming that the major areas can be accessed next season (Sunrise and Paradise). It will likely be years before the roads can be repaired, unless major emergency Federal funding happens (this is all Federal land, so it is Federal funding), in which case it will be a couple of years. In one spot a gully 60 ft wide and 80 ft deep has crossed a road.

I’d pass on a trip to Mt Rainier in the next few years unless you live nearby (I do). However, storms like this happen about every ten years in the PNW, and this time Rainier took the brunt.

*BC=British Columbia, part of Canada, the USA’s major trading partner, and part of the PacNorWest economy.

This article from the Cato Institute paints a very depressing image of President Bush’s bail out for New Orleans and the areas affected by hurricane Katrina. Calling President Bush, Franklin Delano Bush, based on this seems inaccurate in timing only given that President Bush has expanded spending at a rate that would have left Republicans sputtering in rage if President Clinton had tried it.

Franklin Delano Bush promised a gigantic federal relief effort–one that would go far beyond the traditional idea of disaster relief. He didn’t just promise to clean up debris, or provide temporary housing, or even rebuild New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. He promised that federal taxpayers would pay for the education of displaced children in both public and private schools. And that Medicaid would pay for health care for evacuees. And that taxpayers would give displaced workers cash grants of $5,000 each.

Sweeping streets of debris is one thing. Sweeping promises are another. Bush promised that rebuilt communities “must be even better and stronger than before the storm.” Oh, and he promised to cure poverty, inequality, and racism along the Gulf Coast.

The president didn’t tell us what all this would cost, but experts have been suggesting a figure of $200 billion. That would be about twice what American taxpayers spent (adjusted for inflation) on the Marshall Plan to rebuild all of Western Europe after the devastation of World War II. As Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal, with $200 billion you could give each of the 500,000 evacuated families $400,000. That would surely be the largest cash transfer program in history. And it raises the question: What’s the federal government going to do that costs $400,000 per family?

$400,000 per family!?!?! Damn I want a Hurricane to destroy my house and neighborhood too. Where do I sign up for a disaster of similar magnitude? Let me see, I could be completely debt free and with a significant chunk of change left over with which to either buy a new house or invest and wait for housing prices to come back down. Or simply rebuild my current house, after all, I’d still own the land and that is the bulk of a house’s price.

Bush’s speech came just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana and Mississippi, revealing the incompetence of federal, state, and local governments. Clearly no serious thought has been given to what ought to be done for the future.

Yeah, and by promising such a huge bailout for this incompetence at all levels of government it has the consequence of ensuring that we will still have incomptent federal, state and local governments. Brilliant.

Just another example of how the Republican party has become the second party in favor of big government. What is the difference between Republicans like President Bush and Democrats? Besides gay marriage, stem cells, abortion, and the war in Iraq I can’t see much difference anymore.

Update: In comments Anderson felt that my sarcastic comment about the $400,000/person transfer was too callous. The wording was deliberate. I wrote it that way to point out the problem with these kinds of bailouts. They encourage precisely the kind of behavior we don’t want to encourage such as builiding your house behind a levy below sea level. Not only is this risky in that you can lose your house and even your life, afterwards the rest of us are stuck bailing you out financially. Granted people are not going to get a check for $400,000. However, there is the $5,000 grants to displaced workers. On top of that houses will be rebuilt, schools will be paid for (both public and private) and all of this will be done with my money, my neighbors money, and so forth.

Anderson also points out the misery that Katrina has caused. Fine, but doesn’t the government bear some of the responsibility for this? After all, it was the government, at all levels, that failed in providing relief before, during, and after the hurricane. And if a large part of the relief money is going to be squandered away, again, isn’t that again the responsibility of the government? After all, it is the government spending the money.

And all that squandered money also hurts the rest of us. That money and the resources it could purchase are no longer available for legitimate government tasks such as making sure terrorists don’t execute another attack on this country. Or maybe revamping our immigration and border control situation/apparatus. This idea is captured in Chris Edwards’ comments,

Government failures before and after both Katrina and 9/11 illustrate a fundamental problem with the federal government: It runs such a vast empire that policymakers spend little time making sure that basic government functions work. With regard to New Orleans, experts knew that the levees in the city operated by the Army Corps of Engineers were inadequate, but the problem was not addressed. Louisiana was no doubt complacent because it assumed that the levees were Washington’s responsibility.

As the federal government has expanded into state, local, and private activities, members of Congress are overwhelmed with minutiae on schools, roads, housing, and hundreds of other nonfederal issues. There is almost no time left for members to focus on more critical issues such as national security and disaster planning.

Was the comment callous? Sure, but so was the way in which President Bush handled the issue relief and relief spending. Was there any regard given to future disasters like a hurricane that is a catagory 4 or 5 that actually makes landfall squarely on top of New Orleans? No, probably not. Was there any concern to the impact on the deficit, interest rates and future taxes? No, probably not. Was there any concern given to how else that money could have been used, or at least a part of it? No, probably not. Does anybody in the Bush Administration still care about improving disaster responsiveness amongst local, state and federal agencies? No, probably not.

Today’s New York Times fronts a story entitled “‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid.”

Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion. A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance. There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee. And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement. “The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Such an outcome was feared soon after Congress passed the initial hurricane relief package, as officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross acknowledged that their systems were overwhelmed and tried to create new ones on the fly. “We did, in fact, put into place never-before-used and untested processes,” Donna M. Dannels, acting deputy director of recovery at FEMA, told a House panel this month. “Clearly, because they were untested, they were more subject to error and fraud.”

Officials in Washington say they recognized that a certain amount of fraud or improper payments is inevitable in any major disaster, as the government’s mission is to rapidly distribute emergency aid. They typically send out excessive payments that represent 1 percent to 3 percent of the relief distributed, money they then ask people to give back. What was not understood until now was just how large these numbers could become.

Truly a shame, if entirely predictable. While some of the blame here falls on FEMA, DHS, and the administration, it’s mostly just the nature of sympathy politics. By rushing to dump billions of dollars on the problem to demonstrate that “we care” about the victims of disasters and to avoid accusations of moving too slowly, we dumped money out there without normal safeguards.

Given the nature of the disaster, it may have been entirely reasonable to take people’s word for the fact that they’d lost children, for example. But this created a climate where sleazy people with no conscience could take advantage of “free money.”

This is not your grandmother’s “Humane Society”.

Those of us closely involved in dog sport have been long aware that the Humane Society of the United States is nothing more than an activist animal rights movement that has “appropriated” the identity of a long established and respected animal welfare organization. It is endlessly frustrating to hear their representatives quoted by media as though they were – often the same media that is finally alert and skeptical towards PETA.

According to Activistcash.com ” HSUS has accumulated $113 million in assets and built a recognizable brand by capitalizing on the confusion its very name provokes. This misdirection results in an irony of which most animal lovers are unaware: HSUS raises enough money to finance animal shelters in every single state, with money to spare, yet it doesn’t operate a single one anywhere.”

Like many groups of this kind, they have a habit of exploiting natural disasters to excite the donation stream. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were no exception. Complaints from animal rescuers on the ground have been gathering for months, and now the Louisiana Attorney General has opened an investigation.

Attorney General Charles Foti Opens Inquiry into Humane Society of the United States

March 27, 2006: (Baton Rouge, LA)-Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., announced today that his office has opened an inquiry into allegations involving funds raised for pet /owner reunions by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The Attorney General’s Office is asking the HSUS for an accounting of all funds HSUS raised for the purpose of pet rescue and reunion with pet owners in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

[...]

The Attorney General is asking anyone with information about questionable fundraising activities by animal groups or any other groups to please contact the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Section at 1-800-351-4889 or visit our website at www.ag.state.la.us.

If you want to support animal welfare causes, your safest bet is to donate to your local shelter.